Paulo Nuin

Their description of the process sounds very like what conference attendees have been doing for some time, using FriendFeed. Shiny new technology sometimes generates amnesia, I think :-) - Neil Saunders

+1 Neil I wish we could do less of the "OMG this new technology will change everything!!1!" and "meh, Your favorite technology sucks" both. Wave is cool because of the protocol, not because of the client. - Mr. Gunn

In fact, it's uncool because of the client (which is just horrible) - Deepak Singh

FF will be the best platform to cover conferences in real-time, Wave is still in development, lots of bugs, not public linkable, Twitter is the last one - suck at it. IMHO - Alexey

Twitter can be amazing at conferences. I once remember following an entire talk standing in line at a Starbucks on a mobile phone entirely on Tweets. Friendfeed is great for discussion, twitter for soundbites/snippets and just keeping in touch. - Deepak Singh

Smart use of hashtags works OK for conferences, and you can capture stuff that would otherwise go uncaptured because you don't have time to type more than 140 chars, but I agree, FF is much better if you have a laptop and wifi that works and all that. - Mr. Gunn

how can you link or embed discussion on Twitter about let's say 1 talk? You easily do it on FF - you can see all of subsequent replies in one place, you can link to it - Alexey

I do all FF things at work only through mobile, you don't need laptop to do all things on FF - everything you need is mobile device in your pocket - Alexey

well, hashtags work OK for linking discussions and while ff mobile is easier, it's not as easy as banging out a quick sms to 40404. - Mr. Gunn

Alexey, if you want in depth discussions then FF is the way to do. To grab a variety of snippets, exchange DM's on the fly, ask someone to ask specific questions in another room Twitter works really well. It's also better to find people with mutual interests, since the userbase is so much larger in general. Agree that when I used Twitter extensively at conferences FF did not exist, so behavior will be different now - Deepak Singh

@Deepak - agree, "on the fly" Twitter could be better. Now we have enough tools to cover conferences in the real-time, only the problem is how to find folks who up to it? If I'll able to find 5-10 creative folks in 1k-10k attendee conference who up to FF/tweet/wave about it in real-time I'd be happy. The questions of tools of choice will be secondary. More likely these folks use all of them. - Alexey

Alexey ... well said!!! - Deepak Singh from IM

I think setting up friendfeed with a twitter rss feed of the conf hashtag could give the best of both worlds. You can follow the conf in realtime but have the ensuing breakout discussions. - Justin H. Johnson from iPhone